130106 PS Social History of Literature (PS): Advanced Postcolonial Literature and Theory (2016S)

Postcolonial theory, which developed in the 1980s, is today one of the most productive analytical tools for the study of culture. Rather than being an abstract theory, it is a dynamic discourse that emerged from the cultural and social experience of the colonial and postcolonial citizen. Through a close reading of literary texts, the course will study colonial discourse as a textual enterprise of domination and postcolonial discourse as a form of resistance against the Eurocentric assumptions of English literature and culture and as a way of redefining the postcolonial self and the world. The reading selection covers the most representative English-language postcolonial authors from Africa, East Asia, the Caribbean, United States and Great Britain, focusing on the novel. Literary texts will be used as the basis for the explication of key terms of postcolonial theory such as "anti-colonial resistance", "hybridity", "otherness", "mimicry" and "post-nationalism". The topics to be covered are: anti-colonial nationalism, theorizations of race and language, the postcolonial self, postcolonial historical revisionism, nationalist reconstructions, gender and the postcolonial nation, postcolonialism and globalization, exile, migrancy and displacement, and transcultural writing.
Goals:
- identify, analyse and understand the key philosophical, historical, political and aesthetic issues of postcolonial literature
- apply close reading skills and critical thinking to a variety of literary texts
- reflect critically on the relations between primary texts and relevant secondary texts
- discriminate between ideas and justify personal positions
- produce well-structured, relevant arguments with an appropriate intellectual framework